For a while now, design has increasingly been advocated as an approach for looking at issues in society in general. This has developed into a growing area known as social design – where design engages with social and cultural issues. Discussions have spanned topics such as responsibility in design education and innovation within collaborative design practices in education and industry. That said, applying design principles to non-design contexts requires rigour and context.
That said, communication design is arguably a little behind in areas of social design – for example within media communication and challenges within media literacy. For example, disinformation has become widely discussed in recent years within media literacy education, with the web’s founder Tim Berners-Lee (2017) commenting on it as a major threat. Not that this is necessarily a new thing – and disciplines such as media and communication and cultural studies have certainly engaged with it.
Efforts to enhance media literacy have included social media guidelines, governmental initiatives (for example in Finland through education) and in France. But, entrenched beliefs are often hard to shift. It has been suggested that even when individuals are presented with correct information, they can remain resistant to acknowledging this (De Keersmaecker & Roets, 2017). This suggests a need for alternative strategies, and educational design methods such as defamiliarisation are worth researching.
It seems pretty much a truism that graphic design plays a crucial role in shaping narratives using visual information to communicate complex meaning. Designers often interact with notions around myth, re-producing meaning in areas such as advertising and branding. Because of this, is it possible that design approaches could be used to enhance media literacy, perhaps as tools within education? For example, in graphic design, practitioners use methods such as flipping text upside-down to help them isolate letterspacing (kerning) issues. Such ‘defamiliarisation’ approaches are intended to intentionally making familiar concepts appear ‘unfamiliar’, so as to help uncover and observe things that are ‘hiding in plain sight’.
Perhaps using such approaches in media literacy education could potentially help students critically analyse media narratives? For example, exercises might include creating altered versions of media content to reveal hidden meaning. Such exercises could engage students in design activities, in the process encouraging critical reflection and, in turn, potentially promoting a deeper understanding of how media communication function.
Further research, including collaboration between educators, media professionals and designers is needed to explore the practical applications of these speculations. As well as that, further research might also add to a deeper understanding of the role of graphic design within education and society (Meron, 2024).
Berners-Lee, T. 2017. 3 dark trends that could destroy the web. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/three-challenges-for-the-internet-according-to-its-inventor/: World Economic Forum.
De Keersmaecker, J. & Roets, A. 2017, ‘Fake news’: Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive ability on the impact of false information on social impressions, Intelligence (Norwood), 65, 107-110.
Meron, Y. (2024), Looking at things strangely: Defamiliarisation as a design approach for media literacy education, The Design Journal.
Communication & Graphic Design Research 